Feathers fly on Wall Street

Monday 6 April 2009 11.50 EDT
First published on Monday 6 April 2009 11.50 EDT

Where's the anger in America? A few thousand people rallied in New York's financial district this weekend to protest at Wall Street's runaway excesses, together with the broader follies of capitalism. But it was all a bit lame compared to tense confrontations in Britain, France and Germany.

Wall Street 'pillow fight protests'. Photograph: Andrew Clark

The Wall Street marchers gathered downtown and proceeded towards Battery Park, yelling slogans such as "bail out the people, not the banks" and "whose street? Our street!". The mixture of motivations was a hotch-potch, with causes ranging from full-on revolutionary socialism to global warming, freedom for East Timor, an end to fighting in Afghanistan and gay marriage.

Granted, the weather was a bit grim. And it was a Saturday, so there weren't any bankers at work to lean out of office windows with wads of twenty-dollar notes. But the mood was earnest, even festive, rather than furious. Nobody seemed even tempted to smash up a branch of a bank.

An interesting piece in the New York Times this weekend pondered why US unions have largely stayed off the streets since the credit crunch began. One reason, historians suggest, is that America's deep individualist streak means that people who lose their jobs are more likely to feel guilty or ashamed, in contrast to anger in Europe. Saturday's events culminated, rather eccentrically, in a pre-organised pillow fight outside the New York Stock Exchange in which a thousand or so people gathered to give each other a good thump. A few people had scrawled anti-capitalist sentiments onto their pillows. One had a Bob the Builder pillow inscribed "broken economy – can we fix it? Yes we can!" This doesn't seem likely to shake the financial system to its core.